by SHUBHAM SHARMA
Unfortunately, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar has become the talk of the town. The intellectual turf of India seems to be divided between those who defend Savarkar’s legacy and the left-liberal intelligentsia, who believe he displayed cowardice in his mercy petitions, and that he had his hands in the despicable murder of Mahatma Gandhi.
The former group is being led by Vikram Sampath who has written a two-volume biography on Savarkar. The latter group are historically in the right in their denunciation of Savarkar, yet Sampath appears to be receiving a patient and passionate hearing on various platforms. In my opinion, the reason behind this is that the left-liberals of India are missing the wood for the trees. They tend to be on the defensive when Sampath brings to the table the fact that Savarkar was not the only one who had petitioned the British for mercy, and that many others did the same.
The contours of the title ‘Veer’
The Andaman Islands were a horrific place to be held prisoner. Cut off from the mainland, it was the most stringent penal colony, where those gaoled, either lost their minds, or became afflicted with long term illnesses. Savarkar too, suffered there at the hands of the British, and wrote mercy petitions to them. Given the circumstances, it was perfectly understandable. But the question that arises then, is why he has been designated the title of ‘veer’ or brave.
Moreover, Savarkar wrote his first petition, pledging loyalty to the British, less than two months after his transportation to the Andamans in August 1911. Compare this to the sixty three-day hunger strike by the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association (HSRA) demanding better treatment for prisoners. Jatin Das gave up his life while on strike. With this, it is left to the readers to decide whether the glorious epithet, ‘veer’, is a perfect fit for Savarkar or not.
Deficiencies in the liberal argument
Now let us examine the weaknesses of the left-liberal position. They have failed to sufficiently highlight the most potent venom that Savarkar injected into the Indian body politic – Hindutva. Savarkar was not the first one to coin the term; Chandra Nath Basu used the term as the title of his book, published by Gurudas Chatterjee in 1892 in Bengal, and gave it a theoretical finesse.
On the other hand, in his 1923 essay, Essentials of Hindutva, Savarkar argued that all those who exclusively regarded the space between Indus and the Indian ocean as pitrabhumi (ancestral homeland) and punyabhumi (sacred land), constituted the nation. Hindus, Sikhs, and Jains met the qualification easily, while Muslims were forced to reconsider their extraterritorial holy places.
This deliberate sleight of hand was used to discount Muslims from the Indian nation. Savarkar’s logic is bogus on two grounds. Firstly, his heuristics of punyabhumi and pitrabhumi fail to offer a universally acceptable theory or definition of nationalism. If his scheme of things is applied by a student of social sciences, no country in Europe or Northern America would be considered a nation because the main holy lands of the Christians are situated in the Middle East. Similarly, no Muslim country outside the Arabian Peninsula could claim nationhood for itself because of its geographic distance from the sites of Mecca, Medina and Karbala.
By this logic neither Indonesia, the 72 million strong five central Asian countries of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, nor Malaysia or the Maldives are nation states. In short, all those who live in these lands are invaders and the ‘real’ dwellers await their own Savarkars.
Secondly, the idea of punyabhumi rebels against the idea of a civic and secular nationalism, which is the foundational idea of the Indian Constitution. By placing religion as a criterion of nationhood, Savarkar fails to acknowledge other cultural traits such as language, a long history of continuous stay, and amicable communitarian co-existence as markers of nationalism.
Learning from Pakistan, a product of religious nationalism
The sordid nature of religious nationalism could well be gauged from the conditions of our western neighbour, Pakistan, a country that was built on the idea of religious nationalism.
Right from the beginning, minorities within Islam faced the wrath of religious nationalism. The worst affected were the Ahmadiyas.
Since the new State of Pakistan was confused about the nature of religious nationalism, it appointed a Commission under the chairmanship of Justice Mohammad Munir in 1953 to investigate the anti-Ahmadiyya pogroms and the feasibility of an ‘Islamic’ Pakistan. The Commission produced a 387-page report after exhaustive hearings, which concluded early in 1954. It interviewed almost all leading clerics and found that they often considered each other’s beliefs incompatible with Islam.
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